The Expansion of the French Idea (part II)

England,
however, barely missed participating in the miracle at the same time with
northern France, when the latter country lived through that moment which, until
then, has never occurred more than once in the history of a people and which
France, the India of the Middle Ages, and the Ancient Empire of Egypt alone
have known. England discovered the ogive at the same time that we did, if not
some years earlier. Why, therefore, could she not, by making use of those
powerful faculties for generalization of which, from Roger Bacon to Newton, she
has given as great a proof as we have from Abelard to Lamarck—why could she not
systematize the use of the ogive, hang the stones of her soil in the air
between two diagonal lines of ribbing, articulate the gigantic limbs of the
great body, and cause the flying buttresses to rise from the pavement of the
cities as if to support the weight of the towers? [And why did she send over to
France for Guillaume de Sens if this builder, and perhaps the architect of
Saint-Denis, were not the first in Europe to use the broken arch as the
determining principle of the whole architecture of the ogive?]

It was
because the English cathedral was principally the luxury of a certain class of
society, because it did not translate one of those surges of idealism in which
the French crowd sometimes offers a meeting place—for ten years, for a month,
for an hour—to the poor and the rich, to those who do nothing, and to those who
work, to those who suffer, and to those who are happy. As in France, to be
sure, the English middle class had, in the eleventh century, secured the rights
that were confirmed by Magna Charta in 1215. But in order to maintain these
rights it was not obliged to struggle constantly as did our communes, which
were menaced incessantly by the Church and the barons. In the freedom of the
English commune, the solidarity of the social organs was not so necessary, and
the fierce pride of the corporations, which the political powers always treated
on the footing of equality, set them up one against the other without danger to
themselves. The cathedral was an expression of the wealth they had in common
and not of their brotherhood.

It is
egoistic, exclusive, and close to the great current of humanity; its formula is
stiff and dry, seldom animated—and then always timidly—by the confused and
swarming life of the bas-reliefs and the statues through which the French
artisans brought to the framework of society, like fruits on an altar, the
tribute of their love. For five hundred years the aristocratic arts of priests
and soldiers had been carried on in the shelter of the ramparts of the military
strongholds and the walls of the monasteries of these mystic islands, and from
such arts nothing of the people, or of life itself, could come forth. Ireland,
with its dripping humidity buried under its green leaves, could not pass on to
England, when transmitting Christianity to that country, anything more than the
miniatures patiently composed in its monasteries while the eternal rain
drenched the windowpanes. The weapons of the Saxons, the carved prows of the
Scandinavian barks, and the importations from Byzantium were only so many
separate elements for which the flame of a homogeneous people, that could weld
them into a unified force, was lacking. When the Normans arrived they
appropriated the Roman tradition imported from France in the course of previous
centuries, and built many powerful churches in which a square and crenelated
tower rose from the center of the nave, as if to impress upon the mind the idea
of military domination. But they were camping on British soil. They were to
furnish to the English people only the unshakable foundation of temples and
strongholds. Cathedrals, abbeys, castles, ramparts, illuminated manuscripts,
funerary statues of alabaster—all was an art of the classes, from the beginning
until the hour when Shakespeare frees and spreads over the world the torrent of
emotions and images sealed up in the heart of the crowd by all those somber
stones and those carved sepulchers.

As one
descends the valley of the Seine, the spires that appear above the towers
become sharper and frailer. In Normandy, the life that creeps about the side of
the French cathedrals and thoroughly imbues them with movement, becomes fixed
and already tends to lose movement, even while it becomes slighter and more
abundant, while the mass becomes airy and is cut into more and more by
openings. The mighty poem of the people becomes complicated, mannered, and
inclines toward the attributes of the art object. We are midway between the
social art of France and the stiff rich monument, that we see when the mist
rises, lifting above the lawns and the trees the symmetrically pointed spires
and the parapets of the central tower that weighs heavily upon the long, low
nave. Already at Rouen and at Coutances the tower is placed over the cross of
the transept. And if the living decoration of the French provinces still
animates the Norman churches, their sharply cut and voluntary movement gives us
a foretaste of the geometrical decoration of England.

The
diadem raised by the merchants of the British Isles above their rude industrial
cities seemed to be made by the hands of goldsmiths and, in contrast with the
enthusiasm expressed in the monuments which on the other side of the Channel
derive their life from the houses and the fields in order to exalt it, the
English cathedral is very obviously conceived as a proud homage to the
emancipation of a hard and egoistic class. Whereas wings spread out above the
naves of the Continental churches in which the vibrant columns rose from the
soil, here a wooden roof supported by corbels dominated the low naves, which
were arrested on all sides by implacable horizontals. Often, tight sheaves of
parallel ribbing choked all the lines of the nave whose profiles and curves
disappeared among the tense clusters which they formed—a forest composed of a
thousand dead branches without the leafage of the vault and without space and
without air above them. In the apse, where the French builder allowed the darkness
to deepen, where the wall was rounded like a cradle about the living god that
it inclosed so lovingly, the wall fell away like a portcullis, permitting the
light to pass through the straight-lined colonnades as if they were iron
railings.

The
supreme expression of the English ogival style, the perpendicular, appeared at
the time when, among us, the flame of stone, crackling as it launched skyward,
was announcing the last flicker of the exhausted life around which a fatal
twilight was rapidly gathering. On the one hand we have the end of a dream, on
the other an affirmation of the will; on one side the abrupt dissociation of
the social forces, the defeat that comes day by day, even as man's illusions
recommence each day, the mad charges, the feverish plunging of a civilization
at the point of death—and on the other side the concentration of all the means
of conquest: method in warfare, a definite goal to attain, victory, the
practiced and steady rigor of a civilization that is determining and establishing
itself. Whereas on the one side there is no longer anything more than ruins or
abandoned works, we find pinnacles arising on the other side and spires
shooting upward, the wrinkled façades that appear to be made of frost and
glass, and the close-set latticed tracery of stone stalactites. For the
spectral, aerial, and vague poetry of the English people to have its full
effect in these icy and magnificent monuments, one should see them under a blue
veil of moonlight or see the sharp spires rising out of the wet leaves and the
mist. The art of the north demands the complicity of the vapor that spreads
through space, of the foliage, of the sleeping water, and the uncertain
illumination of the night. The rectangular manor houses lift up above the lakes
the formidable profile of their polygonal towers, and as we view them we feel
their whole bulk, and yet something more than their bulk, weighing upon the
sinister history of the Middle Ages in England. They would not become a part of
the mighty dream of this people—whose will has all the power that dwells in the
lines of its towers, a people as resistant as their walls, this people whose
soul, when it peers to its depths, is as steeped in fog and moonlight as they
are themselves —they would not become a part of the dream of England, I repeat,
if a mantle of ivy did not cover them from top to bottom, if blood did not
filter between their stones, and if the echo of falling axes were not heard
when one traverses their black corridors, where wandering specters brush by one
in passing. The soul of the north has not been able to define itself by the
visible lines of the world; and only poetry and music are vague enough to
receive it in their embrace.